Why Women Reach for Lipstick During Harsh Economic Times

When times get tough, the tough pull out the war paint. (Photo: Gallery Stock)

Whenever there’s an economic downturn, most women aim to tighten their budgets, with one notable exception — cosmetics. While researchers have previously explained this “lipstick effect” as women attempting to attract romantic partners, a new study says they might actually be trying to get ahead at the office.

Makeup sales have seen strange spikes during major economic stumbles, including post-9/11 and the 2008 recession. McKenzie Rees, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate at Mendoza College of Business, and study co-author Ekaterina Netchaeva were “fascinated” by prior research on this “lipstick effect” but found the explanation of women buying more makeup to lure in a partner a bit limiting. “We were certain that there were other reasons that women wanted to use makeup during recessionary times, including professional motivations, and so we started the project to examine those alternative reasons,” Rees tells Yahoo Beauty.

To make sure they were capturing women’s “real economic concerns” and attributing the uptick in cosmetic sales to the right sources, the researchers surveyed 1,070 women across the United States using a dual-methods approach. This involved multiple questionnaires examining how women felt about the state of the economy, as well as their desires to buy beauty products like lipstick, nail polish, and perfume. “In those studies, we found that as women’s economic concern increased, so did their desire for these beauty products,” Rees says.

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The women also took their research to the lab, where they asked participants to read an article that either described economic decline or nothing remotely related to the state of the American economy. “Then we asked participants to rate how much they were interested in several makeup products, as well as instructional materials such as makeup application tutorials,” Rees explains. “In these studies, we found that the participants who read about the poor economic situation had a stronger preference for these makeup or beauty products and tutorials than those who did not read about the recessionary conditions.”

To ensure they pooled data from women who saw a difference between attracting a romantic partner and getting ahead at work, the researchers conducted multiple pretests to examine reasons women laid down cash for cosmetics. For instance, Rees and Netchaeva sought to determine which makeup women bought for both the office and date night, as well as which products were reserved exclusively for one or the other.

“We also created a scale that measures romantic and professional motivations to see how economic concerns unveiled these motivations in women,” Rees says. “Developing this scale took multiple rounds of studies to ensure that we were tapping into the right motivations. Through these varying methods, we felt confident that we differentiated between women’s romantic and professional ambitions.”

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It seems women seek out stability and resources in a tough economy, and that can mean both finding a partner and securing a foothold at work. Research has supported the idea that more attractive and well-groomed women are often hired, promoted and paid more (for better or worse) — a phenomenon of which women may instinctively be aware. So, today, women are probably more apt to doll up for on-the-job purposes, and not simply to snag a well-off significant other.

Rees says this research is key for understanding the new psychology of American women during tough times. “This is the first study to explicitly acknowledge the breadwinning and self-relying motivations of a modern woman and suggest that women have a strategy that is unique from men’s strategies to fulfill those motivations,” she explains. “Part of the reason that this is so important is that it lends support to the idea that women’s drive for resources have expanded from simply seeking out a partner to securing resources through other means, including working on their own.

Rees says, departing from evolutionary theory, women are finally breaking away from that innate instinct to find a male companion to secure their future.

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